Friday, 21 May 2010

Day 1 Sunny Gravesend to New York, New York!

The alarm went off at 3.20am, an ungodly hour of the morning. The bikes were loaded into 2 cars as my parents drove us to Heathrow. We checked in without a problem and watched our bikes roll off down the belt. Kris was hoping they would arrive safely in New York while I was secretly hoping mine might not! We were also told whilst checking in that we were not sitting together which meant Kris was gutted he couldn’t polish off his plane food and mine while I was thinking… my plan worked! He managed to sweet talk a stewardess to seat us together in the end. A few whisky and cokes reduced the price of the flight with one eye asleep and one eye watching the new releases. We touched down and got the bikes ok. However getting them across the city from the airport to our host Zev’s apartment was not quite so straight forward. We both lugged a 23kg bike box each plus 7kg hand luggage with Kris having an additional 18kg rucksack on his back! We got some funny looks from all sorts of funny looking people on the subway!

All our gear filled Zev’s apartment in Uptown Manhattan Island. After a quick chat with our host, he went off to work and left us to play with Jacob the cat and assemble our bikes. A quick freshen up and headed back downtown where Carolyn on the subway recommended pizza for dinner. We sat on a street corner and people watched when having been up for 24hrs took its toll on us and we called it a night.